A Good Sleep Prioritizes the Memory we Care about

Every human being likes sleeping, may be hobby or a necessity. Whatever but sleep is an essential component for one’s survival? Sleeping not only assures you biological replenishment but it also cleanses your aura and promotes you in a healthy well being. Recently in a study it has been found that during sleep, the experiences you care about are more likely to enter your long-term memory.

A survey was conducted including 8 non Welsh speaking people and told to learn few Welsh words before a period of wake or sleep. It has been observed that those people who slept showed more tendencies to learn those words and those who put some personal value on the world were even better in remembering those words. This assures that the brain during a sleep gathers all useful memories and ties them in a knot which one cannot forget. Moreover this process was even better if a person cares about those memories. The findings were discussed on Friday at the British Science Festival and are soon to be published in the Journal of Sleep Research.

The mere fact that your beliefs about something seem to affect how the brain processes things during the night is really quite astounding. The test was conducted on native English-speaking university students, recently arrived in Wales and not having previously lived in the country. Using a tablet computer app, the participants were presented with 28 Welsh and Breton translations of English words .The app tested immediate recall of the words and then how many were remembered 12 hours later, after either no sleep or at least 6 hours’ sleep. Participants were also asked to rate how much they valued the Welsh language .For the sleep group only, there was a significant correlation between the values placed on the Welsh language and the number of Welsh words recalled.

According to Prof Blagrove and Ms van Rijn, this suggests that anything we have experienced is more likely to be consolidated in our sleep, if it is something we value personally. The study was conducted in the Swansea sleep lab, where the team also studies the occurrence and the effects of dreams.

It’s really fascinating that the how much we care about a particular memory ensures its priority inside our brain and for how long would it be remembered by us.